About the Grain
Hugo - the ground for the Grain
How to create a website? Hosting is the least of the problems—there are plenty of solutions available online, including free ones. I chose paid hosting because photos tend to be somewhat heavy in large clusters, and I like to have some margin of digital space. Tools are also not much of an issue — it all depends on your expectations and needs. At first, I thought about using WordPress, and for a while, it seemed I would settle on Blogspot. However, I wanted simplicity and lightness in the solution I would use.
Eventually, after jumping between tutorials and inspecting the source code of other blogs, I came across Hugo — a static site generator. In a nutshell, it allows you to create efficient and easy-to-maintain websites, especially blogs. Its biggest advantages include lightweight performance, modular structure, and considerable flexibility. But there’s one caveat: without persistence, a flexible mind, and some technical savvy, it’s easy to get lost in it all. Otherwise, one flails around like a hornet under a lone streetlight.
Working on the current version of Szumne Ziarno has essentially been a painstaking process of recalling HTML, CSS, and Markdown. I rely on documentation, artificial intelligence, and my own intuition in this learning. With that in mind, when designing the blog’s framework, I used a Hugo theme called smol — one of many available templates. I set myself the highest priority to create something simple, functional, and visually pleasing, though I had to wrestle a bit writing scripts for the lightbox functionality. Nevertheless, the minimalist aesthetic of Szumne Ziarno is a result of constraints and ambitions.
From the very beginning, Szumne Ziarno was meant to be simple and clear—without unnecessary fireworks that could distract from the essence. Word and image play the key role here. I also wanted this site to become a medium promoting valuable things, above all local ones. In this context, I feel obliged to mention one of the graphic pillars of this project—namely, Kurier.
Note well about Kurier
Following the source of Janusz M. Nowacki, the foundations of the typeface named Kurier were created in 1973 by Małgorzata Budyta as part of her diploma work in printing lettering at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. In 1975, the typeface was refined at the Printing Type Center, taking its final form. Designed for printing daily newspapers using linotype technology, Kurier was meant to be a simple and effective solution which, with the rise of more modern technologies, somewhat faded into the margins of history. Here, the TeX User Group team—Bogusław Jackowski, Janusz M. Nowacki, and Piotr Strzelczyk — came to the rescue by digitizing this typeface into a widely available font.
I stumbled upon Kurier quite by chance while looking for a default font for my MX Linux distribution (ultimately settling on League Spartan)). I found the site https://typoteka.pl, where I had a chance to brush against the history of Polish typography. Besides Kurier, I discovered fonts like:
- Paneuropa (a Polish adaptation of Futura, used, for example, in the Small Statistical Yearbook 1935)
- Bona and its digitized version Bona Nova
- Brygada (Brygada 1918 is the official font of the President of the Republic of Poland)
- Antykwa Półtawskiego with its version digitized by the GUST team
Designing Polish typefaces is a fascinating topic, undoubtedly worth exploring and preserving. That’s why I decided to contribute my own small brick to popularizing knowledge in this area—even though I haven’t fully mastered it and don’t consider myself an expert, though I do admit there’s a bit of printing-house blood running through my veins.
Plagiarism or inspiration?
It’s true that while creating the layout for the Szumne Ziarno website, somewhere in the back of my mind, the layout of a site dedicated to the activities of Mr. Janusz Nowacki flickered. Well, I won’t deny it, but only to a small extent — Szumne Ziarno is a result of many different influences. Imitation is the highest form of admiration and a compliment in itself, and I can repay that by devoting a bit of attention to Mr JMN, to preserve his memory. We live on as long as some trace of us remains.